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From AFTER ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM
Clement Greenberg
The crux of the matter of the aftermath of Abstract Expressionism has, in any case, little to do with influence in itself. Where artists divide in the last resort is where safe taste leaves off. And this is as true in what begins to look like the aftermath of Abstract Expressionism as it ever was.
The painters who follow Newman, Rothko, or Still, individually or collectively, are as safe by now in their taste as they would be following de Kooning or Gorky or Kline. And I have the impression, anyhow, that some of those who have chosen to do the first, and not the second, have done so because they feel frustrated, merely frustrated, by the going versions of Abstract Expressionism in New York.
This applies even more, I feel, to those other artists in this country who have now gone in for "Neo-Dada" (I except Johns), or con struction-collage, or ironic comments on the banalities of the industrial environment. Least of all have they broken with safe taste. Whatever novel objects they represent or insert in their works, not one of them has taken a chance with colour or design that the Cubists or
Abstract Expressionists did not take before them (what happens when a real chance is taken with colour can be seen from the shocked distaste that the "pure" painting of Jules Olitski elicits among New York artists). Nor has any one of them, whether he harpoons stuffed whales to plane surfaces, or fills water-closet bowls with diamonds, yet dared to arrange these things outside the directional lines of the "all-over" Cubist grid. The results have in every case a conventional and Cubist prettiness that hardly entitles them to be discussed under the heading "After Abstract Expressionism." Nor can those artists, either, be discussed under this heading whose contribution consists in depicting plucked chickens instead of dead pheasants, or coffee cans or pieces of pastry instead of flowers in vases.
Not that I do not find the clear and straightforward academic handling of their pictures refreshing after the turgidities of Abstract Expressionism; yet the effect is only momentary, since novelty, as distinct from originality, has no staying power.
Excerpt, Art International, October 1962:24-32
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